sybarites

Here’s another favorite from America’s Test Kitchen, Bananas Foster. It’s a New Orleans classic.

Wikipedia says:

The dish was created in 1951 by Paul Blangé at Brennan’s Restaurant in New Orleans, Louisiana. It was named for Richard Foster, a friend of Owen Brennan’s and New Orleans Crime Commission chairman.

America’s Test Kitchen makes the recipe easy, but they don’t call for any banana liqueur. I’m not sure if that’s because it’s not required or because it doesn’t meet their mandate of easy at home. Buying an entire bottle of liqueur for one dessert might be silly. However, we’ve now made this enough times that we could have been justified in doing so.

If you are the type to keep bananas and vanilla ice cream in the house, this is a perfect dessert. It’s quick and uses everyday ingredients. This was also the recipe that drove us to cube our unsalted butter. When we buy a block we cut it into tablespoon-sized pieces and put them in the freezer. They are perfect for dishes like this.

The flambé is also quite exciting. The fire reaches up to the microwave, but hasn’t caused any damage.

UPDATE: I just noticed this is our 100th post. That deserves a glass of bubbly.

In anticipation of a near future with little or no access to beef, we have been consuming an extrodinary amount lately. It’s hard to know whether or not we’ll be eating alot of beef in Asia, because I understand it’s pretty expensive, but I figure we’re also pretty spoiled with the beef we get here in Canadian-Texas. How can other beef compare? Undoubtedly, Kobe beef is better but it’s also most definitely beyond our price range.
And so, as we count down the days until departure for Taiwan, we make more and more of our favourites, one of which is bbq’d steak. Lamentably, we don’t have a bbq and, for this meal, we put the heat to a bison rib eye, which I guess technically doesn’t count as beef. It was a small steak, this bison, and prepared very simply with just a little ground Montreal steak spice rub and fried, but holy smokes, every bite was dreamy. Whew- I am gonna MISS good steak.

With it, we had some roasted potatoes and I dragged out an old recipe I have for braised endive that I got from a cooking class I took ages ago, called Quick French Cooking. Ironic that braised veggies are considered “quick” (obviously, the cooks of this course have yet to be subjected to microwaveable kd) but they were a nice, creamy compliment to the bison.

America’s Test Chicken had an episode on how to roast chicken. They do their usual testing of temperatures, pans and tricks—cooking 30 birds or more to produce perfectly crispy skin, moist breasts and fully cooked thighs. Most recipes recommend a frying chicken (young and small) rather than a roasting chicken (older and larger) because they cook more evenly. Our butcher had a two-for-one special on roasting chickens, so that’s what we had. It needed to cook much longer than our recipe suggested.

We usually try to do something a little fancier than everyman’s roasted chicken. I believe I made lemon roasted chicken the last time because of a Howard Stern show. When I was working in Seattle all the guys would listen to Howard Stern on the way to work. It was horribly funny most days. In one of the most famous episodes he was going on and on for several minutes about how much he enjoyed the chicken his girlfriend cooked and how turned on he was afterward. A woman calls in and says that the recipe is from a recent issue of Vanity Fair. It’s called Engagement Chicken and it supposedly makes men swoon if not propose. Howard calls his girlfriend and confronts her live on the show. It was hilarious.

Our plain old roast chicken was accompanied by roasted potatoes and steamed carrots with ginger. We just mixed the carrots with butter and grated ginger after steaming. I convinced Janet to buy the four dollar bag of small multi-colored potatoes. The purple ones are purple all the way through and have a nice sweetness. We also made some gravy.

We used the leftover chicken to make hot chicken sandwiches, which is one of my childhood favorites.

Our latest braising wasn’t very different from our osso buco or lamb shank recipes—carrots, onions, celery, garlic, red wine and browned meat. However, a few simple additions made a world of difference for Honey and Vinegar Braised Short Ribs with Spinach. Red wine vinegar provided brightness. The caramelized honey and the port provided a sweet depth. The recipe also forgoes tomatoes for a lot of red wine.

We found a Canadian merlot at the Superstore for $6.36. I’m sure we would have been hungover the next day if we had drank it all instead of pouring half into the pot. It didn’t taste too bad, but neither did it taste like a merlot. The tannins and sulfites were very high and a white film was just visible on the surface.

We also discovered that the last 30 minutes in the oven make a big difference. The recipe stated 2 to 2.5 hours in the oven. I’m glad we didn’t rush. The meat was very tender. The next time we make veal shanks or lamb shanks we’ll use the same recipe.

On the side was Horseradish Mash Potatoes. Jan winged that one, but it was similar to this recipe. The recipe also called for the ribs to be served on spinach quickly sautéed with butter. We wouldn’t change a thing–except make more.

We finally got around to posting the third miracle of the grocery store, puff pastry. You may remember wonton wrappers and phyllo as the other two. Puff Pastry Apple Tarts Glazed With Honey may not be a world class tart tatin, but it is a simple, tasty treat. There are only 5 ingredients—apples, pastry, butter, sugar and honey. The hardest part is remembering to take the pastry out of the freezer. We once served this with leftover marscarpone, which was an excellent substitution for vanilla ice cream.

The Sauternes, which the recipe recommends, is a French dessert wine. It’s not as sweet or as high in alchohol as a sherry or an ice wine, nor is the flavour as intense. In weight and flavour, it’s between regular white bordeux and an ice wine. We found a half bottle at the Superstore Liquor store for $20.

The combination of the apples and honey with the golden raisin flavour of the Sauternes is quite striking. It’s high on my list of best pairing I’ve ever had. Both had a similar level of sweetness, and they strengthened the caramel and fruit flavours in the other. I find a liqueur or ice wine is often too strong to compliment a dessert. Wine can be over powered by the sweetness. Sauternes is a pleasant compromise.

We cooked Nemo’s Dad for supper.  (What?!  His name is Marlin!)  Actually, we had intended to make tuna but the fishmonger advised us against buying the stuff she had on display as it was “about to get up and go for a walk”.  Presumably, this meant it was kinda old.  Ergo, we bought two slabs of marlin instead and concocted the orange-ginger sauce to go with.  

Marc was again inspired by the vertical presentations of Made To Order on the Food Network and so he built a platform of white rice for the seared fish.  I made up a sesame vinaigrette for the green beans which I will never be able to replicate, which is probably for the best because it was too salty.   It seems like so long ago that we had this, I can’t even remember what we had to drink with it….  oh, wait- it was wine.

So, this is the recipe that called for Swiss chard but for which we had to use kale because of this whole incident.   Anyway, it really doesn’t make that much of a difference as they were equally satisfactory meals.

We have been, admittedly, quite reticent in our blogging of late.  I blame the typhoid.  And the stress associated with the travel preparations, which have most recently involved a lot of website modifications (then fixes, then additions, then more modifications), thousands and thousands of painful needles in our arms, booking accommodations in our first destination and sorting out exactly what we should be doing to get a visa for China and for Russia.  Ultimately, we have made mountains out of mole hills.  I hope we can both learn to chill the fuck out on this journey.

And this segues nicely into a suggestion to check out the RTW Travel section of our site/blog.  I have had to learn how to use HTML, it’s been that crazy.

Unrelated to food at all, I learned a new word today:  invidious.   It means to provoke envy or ill will.  I shall use it in a sentence:  “It would seem that, to some people, my descriptions of our travel plans is rather invidious.”    Those people are anxiously awaiting the day they will win the lottery.

I’m sure my score is higher than that, but I haven’t been keeping score until now. When we first started dating Janet had a drunken craving for grilled cheese in the wee hours of the morning. I dutifully accompanied her down empty streets to Gerry’s Diner, previously known as Husky House. It’s part 50s diner, part roadside truck stop and part smoking room. Their use of processed cheese slices is step up from Janet’s use of Cheez Whiz, but she would likely disagree.

Perhaps it’s not fair to compare cheese-flavour-oil sandwiches to Grilled Cheese with Smoked Turkey and Avocado. Adding Smoked Turkey and Avocado to a Gerry’s sandwich would surely improve it in powers of 10, so I’ll focus on the other ingredients. Gerry’s from-god-knows-where preservative-laden white bread versus my homemade brown bread: point to me. Dijon versus nothing: point to me. No-name processed cheese slices dyed orange versus Kraft mozzarella: point to me, if only barely.

On the side was a simple arugula salad. We were unfortunately out of pine nuts and I forgot to shave parmesan on top, but it was still tasty. Arugula can hold it’s own and the vinaigrette included champagne vinegar, honey and lemon.

I now understand the cult of the Italian meatball. Our recipe book stated that each Italian family has its own recipe for meatballs. This one must be one of the best. Perhaps, this is partly due to the fact that meat comprises only half of the meatball; ricotta, pine nuts, onion, parmesan, breadcrumbs, basil, parsley and garlic make up the rest. Wow, nutty cheesy goodness. The 80’s are long past and the best balls are no longer in Sweden, they’re in Italy once again.

Jan also makes an excellent tomato sauce. Some people are shy about using too much tomato paste, but we don’t agree. I like a deep red color. The light tomato sauce on the stuffed mushrooms was appropriate, but when it comes to spaghetti I want more flavour.

Of course, one can tire of a good thing. We’ve made this dish three times and it makes at least three meals, so we’ve eaten this ten or eleven times in the last ten months. That’s a lot of meatballs.

We bought a new box of table salt last week even through there are only 55 days before we leave for Taipei and despite the fact that we already have four other kinds of salt. I didn’t believe I could accurately convert table salt measurements to sea salt measurements when following recipes and sea salt tastes much saltier by volume. Ironically, having the correct type of salt didn’t help in this case. The Stuffed Mushrooms recipe called for ¾ teaspoon of salt in the stuffing, ¾ teaspoon of salt in the sauce, more salt in the breadcrumb topping and salt sprinkled on the mushrooms. The result was still tasty, but clearly salty.

The stuffing wasn’t soft or fluffy. It was like eating a bunless pork-portobello burger. I also put all the breadcrumbs into the pork stuffing, leaving little for the topping.  It was suppose to have a thick layer of breadcrumbs on top. Perhaps that would have made it even more like a burger. The tomato sauce was plain, but visually dressed up the dish. The recipe-suggested buttered macaroni was a simple and effective pairing.

I would call this comfort food; the simple elements created a tasty treat, although the starch content is not high enough to support Wikipedia’s theory:

A substantial majority of comfort foods are composed largely of simple or complex carbohydrate, such as sugar, rice, refined wheat, and so on. It has been postulated that such foods induce an opiate-like effect in the brain, which may account for their soothing nature.

Perhaps I could miniaturize them into clever hors d’oeuvres. A few ingredient substitutions could also make them Asian. How does stuffed shiitakes with sesame-ginger pork, panko crust and miso dressing sound?